Exactly. I’m curious how you think about capacity and scaling. Right now, I’m most familiar with vTaiwan. You were mentioning you have other forums and regional...
There’s fundamentally no limit to, "Here’s a problem. Who are the right stakeholders? Let’s get them around the table." Because they’re stakeholders, they should be interested.
One of the promises of participatory democracy that we rarely talk about is the potential for de-bottlenecking.
There’s a huge power struggle on what actually makes it onto the...
...and by the time. You know that if whatever the exact total, the president has this project and there’s only so many other things that you can do.
...structure and decision-making is that is limited just by the number of people that you have in parliament and then by the political agenda...
I’m interested in this concept of capacity. The problem with traditional parliamentary...
Yeah.
That’s right.
Maybe your threshold is set differently at 5,000 voices already, but what you find in a lot of US states is that you actually need to do very expensive door-to-door canvassing. These things are...
To me, it has a big difference if it’s money or if it’s emotional engagement.
[laughs] People who have the means to do that can get their agenda presented on the ballot.
Why is it a problem?
You basically pay outfits. What you notice is that measures that get on the ballot are measures that are funded often by special interests in the US. It ends up not being a very democratic process because a few people on their own are able to reach the kind of ...
What you find is that the signatures, it ends up not being a very democratic model at all because, basically, you can manufacture signatures. If you have enough money...
The reason I’m curious about this is that what you see in the US, where you have a number of states where people can petition to have things go to a referendum, is that...
The experience that we see... I don’t know if Taiwan...
...you set a threshold is because you say, "Hey, we have limited capacity. We set a threshold because we feel that if you get so many signatures, it must mean it’s more important than..."
The reason why in petitions you ask...
How many people in each of these forums are available? What’s the capacity of volunteers, or of paid people, or of the PDIS people?
I hear you, but it sounds like you’re pointing to the fact that we would have unlimited capacity, which is not true, right? At some point, we need to...
What?
You can take on five, six, seven cases a year or something. Very quickly, you have to filter and decide. "We can take on this, but sorry, we’re..."
The resources we have to address problems are limited, like a parliament can only take on so many bills in a year. vTaiwan, my understanding is right now you can take on...
Wow, this chocolate is really bubbly. This is funny.
The resources that we have to treat projects...
Sorry?
The difficulty I find with all of these is the number of concerns that citizens can have is huge, right, the number of potential topics that they can bring. I find that we haven’t found a powerful way yet to filter.
...that the beginning of the process initiation, the agenda setting is the piece where I feel that we’re the furthest away from cracking it. When you look around the world, how can ordinary citizens bring up the topic either today to parliament or to participating democracy processes like vTaiwan? The ...
Thanks for taking the time. I had a chance to spend some time with Billy today and Fang-Jui and Shuyang before, so I feel very privileged. Maybe with you, I had a number of broader questions. I feel when we look at the whole toolbox of participatory democracy that the ...
I’ll have to try this.
Bubbling?
What does jumpy mean? Spicy?
As a Belgian, chocolate is a serious matter for us.
